Ponte wrote:Interesting day. My lad had a recurrence of the very recently cleared tonsillitis overnight. A call to 111 and then a trip to the out of hours GP resulted in being referred to A&E for suspected quinsy. As they were about to admit him to drain it and hook him up to IV antibiotics they took in mind the fact it was a 13 year old boy and it was Christmas Eve and hunted down the best oral antibiotics they could find, gave good pain killers to go with them and some strict instructions and let us home, rather than him and me waking up Christmas morning in hospital.He’s home, feeling like shit but home.Thank you, NHS staff

Funnily enough I’ve been to an out of hours GP with the youngest Sunling today. Nearest was Burmantofts...nice place.

Back in September my company got a new contract with a group of NHS CCG's to provide H&S Consultancy services, I was given the initial gig so I went to the first meeting to outline exactly where they are and exactly where they need to be going to be compliant. As it is such a big client (60+ sites and 500+ staff employed by the NHS at these sites the plan from my company was to allocate different consultants on a geographical basis which we do all the time. However, the NHS requested that I be their one point of contact across all sites, and that was that, and that is what I am.

Baring in mind these Clinical Commissioning Groups are in the main based in medical centres, doctors surgery's and hospitals so you would think they would have a very basic grasp of things. The groups are made up of doctors, nurses, other medical professionals, legal bods and supposedly some very well educated and intelligent people.

It was made clear to them that any queries must in the first instance be directed to the office so that any minor questions can be dealt with by our office guys, anything requiring a more experienced and qualified consultancy answer would then be filtered out and directed to me, the reason for this is that my time is 85% of the time client facing and I may not be able to answer in a speedy manner. This is standard practice and it works really well for every other client that we have, but not this lot, they have completely ignored this part of the contract and ignored further requests to address their initial questions through the office, we have a big team that are targeted to respond within an hour.

On a daily basis I get emails from all over the CCG's, they must have put my full contact details on the intranet which they were asked not to do, and below are some of the questions that I have had to deal with in the last few weeks alone. These are not made up, exaggerated or anything...

Who should I contact to refill our first aid kit?

If one of the toilets run out of soap of toilet paper, what should we do?

My colleague has a severe diary allergy, is it OK for them to make drinks for meetings?

I got sent a random picture of a basic office chair asking if this chair is suitable for someone who has suffered a broken back, how the fuck would I know, you're surrounded by medical professionals who are highly trained in such things, why the fuck don't you ask them?

We have not had a fire drill for over two years, what should we do?

And whilst I have been typing this, I just got another one from the same twat with the diary intolerant colleague...

Is my colleague allowed to tell people who he works with that he has an epipen?

As part of the contract I had to go and deliver risk assessment training, the director asked me who should be on the course, and I replied 'anyone that will be doing risk assessments'. I delivered the course and asked if anyone had any questions, no questions were asked but they all said they would not be doing risk assessments as they are not paid to do that - completely wasted my time, wankers.

So yes, there is a lot wrong with the NHS, but there is far more wrong with a lot of the people behind the scenes.

With the greatest of respect, I know the absurdities that you are trying to highlight OWETB, but what is clear to me is that you don't understand the problem that faces these people.

I worked in the NHS for a period, and the institutionalisation and fear threatened to bury me. I honestly thought I was going mad when acquiescing to these thought patterns almost seemed tempting, but it's only now from outside I can see it's a type of survival mechanism.

If you think for yourself especially out of hierarchy you might as well put a big fucking target on your back. Don't make decision because then you have to own it, and you know what: draw attention to yourself and you will get stomped on.

You'll soon realise OWETB these people are not thick or fragrantly trying to disregard your instructions, they're just trying frantically grasp at self preservation. If they get an instruction from you, the top man, in writing/email then they cant 'be in trouble'

Sounds pathetic right? But you learn to understand how that looks when the weight of monalythic organisation exerts its self on your shoulders. It might start with a manager who says a seemingly innocuous thing like "can I have a word in a private room about this incorrectly filled first aid kit". God help you if you can't clutch your little piece of paper evidence as to why this happened.. and it must from someone above your inquisitor

Think it’s important to make a distinction between what the NHS does and what it is.

Over the last ten years or so I’ve worked within / alongside a number of massive multinational consultancy organisations with tens of thousands of staff (and of course Carillion and their ilk). For obvious reasons the vast majority of employees are highly educated, but all the problems and fuckwittery B@stard lists above have been there.

There’s something between the nature of the modern world and large organisations which generates this. It’s pretty clear to me that if you turned the NHS into Virgin Care or whatever tomorrow, it would be just the same.

I think it’s top down management that causes the half of it. If people at all levels could be made more locally responsible and self-organising it would be a start.

OWETB wrote:And that is exactly why I said the NHS needs saving from itself.

I think it's more that it needs saving from government(s, of all parties). It's the constant restructuring and dicking about that fucks it, and everyone who works in it, up.

Other countries seem to be much better at letting nominally public organisations organise themselves, like Deutsche Bahn running half our railway operators and TNT originally being the Dutch national post service. If, say, Thatcher had said to the NHS 'right, become an independent subsidiary of government, borrow your own money and expand overseas all the fuck you want' it's easy to imagine that the NHS would be in a better state now.

The dialysis unit I go to is private but overseen by the NHS, They charge the NHS £360 per treatment and it is paid up front a month in advance, that is over a grand a week for my treatment, I have paid a lot of tax and ni in my working life but I doubt it's paid for it. The equipment is state of the art and better than the home unit at Salford where the treatment costs half what it does here, the money does not go on the staff, they are on poor money, less than my son gets at the school where he works. Thing is though they can have 75 % of staff that are only qualified to do dialysis they are not general nursing staff and could not work in a hospital unlike the main unit where they are all nurses.

That rancid dried-up cunt May was asked today to confirm she wasn't going to allow US companies to buy into chunks of the NHS. (This, and the right to challenge any decision against their involvement, were key parts of TTIP before President Drumpf killed it. These companies and their lobbyists are now focused on Brexit.)

She refused.

If you have any love for the NHS, and don't want to die like Americans when you get sick without riches, you now know how not to vote. I'm serious, they want it dead.

You know, I'm sick of following my dreams, man. I'm just going to ask where they're going and hook up with 'em later.

Blackwhite wrote:If you have any love for the NHS, and don't want to die like Americans when you get sick without riches, you now know how not to vote. I'm serious, they want it dead.

This thread was started six years ago as a “memorial” thread - yet the NHS is still here.

The Labour Party has been running a strapline “last chance to save the NHS” or something similar in most UK elections since the 1980s - yet the NHS is still here.

What the NHS needs is less sloganised politics and more intelligent thinking and open discusson about the problems it is facing whoever is in power. These include the rising costs of an ageing population, ever more expensive new treatments, ever rising expectations, and a decreasing ratio of tax paying workers per pensioner to fund it all (a problem likely to be exacerbated by the UK’s Brexit and anti immigration stance).

It does seem to be the case that any reforms to address this underlying sustainability tend to be greeted, in knee jerk and politically opportunist fashion, as an existential threat to the NHS itself - rather than a possible means to preserve its essence in the 21st century.

The biggest threat to the NHS comes not from fresh ideas but from a moribund and partisan UK politics treating it as a political football.

There will be no end to the problems afflicting mankind until economists become rulers, or, by some miracle, rulers become economists.

Jeremy Cunt wrote:I completely recognise the pressures they have been going through and when they signed up to go into medicine they knew there were going to be pressurised moments.

You might not have noticed Mr Cunt, but they're not signing up any more - net, they're signing off in large numbers. Because of you and your business buddies, thou fucking feculent cunt. Go fucking die in a fire.

You know, I'm sick of following my dreams, man. I'm just going to ask where they're going and hook up with 'em later.